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Friday, September 28, 2018

Archives
Month kicks off in October

Gov. Asa Hutchinson has proclaimed October as Archives
Month to spotlight the importance of preserving Arkansas’s past, and the Arkansas
State Archives plans multiple events during the month.

“October, Archives Month — that’s a great time to be
an archivist,” said Dr. Wendy Richter, Arkansas historian and director of the
Arkansas State Archives.

Without the Arkansas State Archives, much of
Arkansas’s history would be lost. Staff have toured counties across the state to
collect and preserve materials and make them more accessible to the public.

“Archivists who save and catalog our
historical documents produce a paper trail to the past,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson
said. “Their attention to conserving our history allow us to reconstruct the
details of life long after all the eyewitnesses are gone. Their dedication to
preservation gives us access to our state’s story — the people, the places and
the politics. I am grateful to those who answer the call to keep track of where
we have been.”

Preserving history is at the heart of what the
Arkansas State Archives does.

Volunteers in Hempstead County, for example, recently sorted through
historic documents to help archivists discover and preserve important
information, including information on slavery in Arkansas. In another example,
the L.C. Gulley collection has priceless documents that attest to the formative
years of Arkansas. Those documents were nearly lost when workers planned to
move the state Capitol to a new building in 1912, but L.C. Gulley, whose job it
was to gather old papers for recycling in St. Louis, dug through piles of paper
and found letters from territorial governors to Native Americans on the Trail
of Tears and records about the political development of the state. Gulley later
donated those records to Arkansas State Archives.

The Arkansas State Archives has been preserving material
for more than 100 years. The agency was founded as the Arkansas History
Commission in 1905, when people were concerned that documents relating to
Arkansas during the Civil War would be lost. The commission’s name changed to Arkansas
State Archives and became a division of the Department of Arkansas Heritage in
2016.

Arkansans have long supported preserving historic
material for future generations. In a Feb. 4, 1907 editorial, the Arkansas
Democrat wrote: “Of course, the state can get along without a history commission,
and it can permit everything which it should be proud to bequeath to posterity
to be forgotten, and all records to be lost or destroyed, but is it the part of
wisdom to do so?”The answer was and remains
“no.”